Garabandal’s Signs and Messages (Fr. Justo Lofeudo) NEW

GARABANDAL’S SIGNS AND MESSAGES

Courtesy of pueblodemaria.com

Reprinted with kind permission of Garabandal Journal /May-June 2019

This article written by Fr. Justo Lofeudo is dated circa 2012.

San Sebastian de Garabandal, the small Cantabrian village of the Marian apparitions of the sixties, was witness to thousands of apparitions of the Blessed Virgin endorsed by so many signs of supernatural order and prodigies.

The signs are that: signs. They are signs that indicate another reality. In this case the presence of the divine. The sign is not given to stay in it but points to the message that came to be given.

Certainly, the first message is the loving presence of the Mother of God and the closeness she manifests by showing herself to be a mother who is understanding and attentive to the smallest detail, to the least concern or suffering and also to the joy of her children. She is universal Mother, of all men, and of each one in particular. This way the girls knew how to transmit it in Garabandal.

But, in addition to showing us her motherly image and for that same reason, the Blessed Virgin came to tell us very important and urgent things for us, for our salvation, for the salvation of the world. For a better understanding it is convenient to situate yourself in the time of these appearances. We are at the beginning of the 60’s, when a few months later Pope John XXIII will convene a new Council, the Second Vatican Council. These years are also the beginning of the spirit of protest and rebellion that will mark the whole epoch and in which the first steps towards the culture of death took place, the loss of values such as the family and the instrumentalization of sex. The decade of the 60s is one of existentialism and the communist apogee, the one of the con-strucdon of the wall of Berlin and the cold war, the one of the crisis of missiles in Cuba and the assassination of the U.S.A. president John Kennedy. Also that of the counterculture of the hippy movement and of the predominance of ideologies, that of the contraceptive pill.

The Mother of God came to speak to us at that time, which is our time. She spoke to us with her presence, with her words and also with signs and wonders. Much has been written and said about Garabandal and many times we have stopped, I would say excessively, about the signs. It is explained: in a time like this one of great skepticism, where immanence displaced transcendence, where in the same Church rationalism has spread and prevailed while the sense of the supernatural has been questioned, the signs have been the answer that allows to recover the sensus fidei [sense of faith]. However, signs and wonders must take us where they point.

THE MESSAGE OF OCTOBER 18, 1961

If the signs have served to draw attention to what was happening in Garabandal and were also given, for who knew how to see them as supernatural, as a seal of authenticity of events, now, with the passage of time, we see that the same messages show us the truth of these manifestations. For all this, let us know in depth the two messages and strive to live them because these are the ones that lead us on the path of salvation: We must make many sacrifices, perform much penance, and visit the Blessed Sacrament frequently. But first, we must lead good lives. If we do not, a chastisement will befall us. The cup is already filling up, and if we do not change, a very great chastisement will come upon us.

“We must make many sacrifices, perform much penance…” Let’s dwell on these first words. For being first and for what they imply they give an idea of the urgency and the seriousness of the message. The first thing that attracts attention are the adverbs “many, much”. Already in Fatima the Blessed Virgin requested sacrifices and penance. Why? She will explain it later in the same message. Humanity was going very badly, turning away from God. What we did not see Heaven did see and it came, in the person of our Mother, to warn us. It was a strong wake-up call. Now, after fifty years of Garabandal, we see how the cracks that separated the world from God have become abysses. How the apostasy has become a deluge that envelops the earth and how Christians are either disappearing or being brutally persecuted.

The greatest tribulation of the Church, however, does not come from outside but from within, from the gravity of the sins committed, where scandals and apostasy of faith have a devastating effect on the Church of Christ and undermine its foundations. The Holy Father [Benedict XVI] demands penance and also does so by remembering the third secret of Fatima, as it was revealed. The Pope asks to purify life. Only sacrifices and penance, together with prayer and above all adoration, have to stop or mitigate the consequences of this walk towards darkness.

MESSAGE OF JUNE 18, 1965

As my message of October eighteenth has not been complied with and has not been made known to the world, I am advising you that this is the last one.

Before, the cup was filling up. Now it is flowing over. Many cardinals, many bishops and many priests are on the road to perdition and are taking many souls with them. Less and less importance is being given to the Eucharist.

You should turn the wrath of God away from yourselves by your efforts. If you ask His forgiveness with sincere hearts, He will pardon you. I, your mother, through the intercession of Saint Michael the Archangel, ask you to amend your lives.

You are now receiving the last warnings. I love you very much and do not want your condemnation. Pray to Us with sincerity and We will grant your requests. You should make more sacrifices. Think about the passion of Jesus.

How was It possible, it was said, that the Blessed Virgin, Mother of the Church, could speak in these terms?

“Before the cup was filling up, now it is overflowing.” Four years later the situation had worsened to the point that it has overflowed. There is no longer a channel to stop the precipitation of evil. And, as we will see, not only in the world but above all in the Church itself. Indeed, “Many cardinals, many bishops and many priests are on the road to perdition and are taking many souls with them.” This part of the message was even more difficult to accept by some members of the Church who were the ones who had to give a judgment about the authenticity of the messages. How was it possible, it was said, that the Blessed Virgin, Mother of the Church, could speak in these terms? It was not wanted to see the bottom of the truth of what was happening. The scandals and the grave errors in the doctrine were expanding and covering entire regions. By paradox of the history today this part of the message is the one that gives more credibility to the appearances.

In the famous Via Cruris meditations of 2005, the then Cardinal Ratzinger warned about the decomposition within the Church. In the ninth station he said: “How much filthiness in the Church and among those who, because of their priesthood, should be completely devoted to Him! How much arrogance, how much selfsufficiency!… (It is present in His Passion) the betrayal of the disciples, the unworthy reception of His Body and of His Blood (sacrilegious Communions) and he had also mentioned the unworthy Eucharistic celebrations), is certainly the greatest sorrow of the Redeemer, tire one that pierces the heart. We only have to shout from the depths of our soul: ‘Kyrie, eleison Lord, save us…’”

In the prayer, which followed the meditation, he added:.. .“We who betray You, notwithstanding the bombastic gestures and the high-sounding words, have mercy on Your Church…. When we fall, we remain on earth and Satan rejoices, because he hopes that we will never be able to get up; he hopes that You, being dragged into the fall of your Church, will be crushed forever. But You will rise. You have been reincorporated; You have resurrected and can raise us up. Save and sanctify Your Church. Save us and sanctify us all.”

Recently, Benedict XVI established the Year for Priests to rekindle in the priests of Christ the love for mission and fidelity to the commitments assumed including chastity. He took as model of priest the holy Cure of Ars, a humble rural priest in anti-clerical France of the nineteenth century who knew how to welcome sinners and take them to the pardon of the sacrament of reconciliation. The model priest, for the Holy Father, is the man of prayer, adoration, lover of the Eucharist, with love that spreads to the part of the people of God that has been entrusted to him and that he spends a lot of time in the confessional.

The Holy Father is aware that the greatest dangers facing the Church do not come from outside but from within, and not only by the scandals of uprising, money and sin against the sixth commandment, in its most perverse and execrable, but—above all—by the greatest of all dangers: the loss of faith. In many houses of study and formation the false theology continues to wreak havoc, provoking, in the best of cases, confusion when it does not open skepticism in young pious people and believers. In seminaries, psychologists and sociologists have taken the place of the spiritual director. In Catholic universities there are many chairs that serve to corrode the faith insinuating uncertainties. Above all, through Bible studies that treat the Word of God not as inspired by the Holy Spirit but as a corpse to be disserted. While mere conjectures are exposed as if they were unappealable truths because they come from a supposedly scientific knowledge, the dogmas of faith are placed under cover or even openly in doubt. For example, in these universities, some pontifical ones, the historical truth of the Resurrection is questioned and even the same divinity of Jesus Christ is questioned. The so-called historical-critical method is, for this theology, the only measure of truth and evidence.

Less and less importance is being given to the Eucharist. You should turn the wrath of God away from yourselves by your efforts. If you ask His forgiveness with sincere hearts, He will pardon you.

The Eucharist is the treasure of the Church, it is the infinite gift that the Lord made of Himself. The Eucharist makes the Church and there is no Church without the Eucharist. The whole spiritual life of the Church recognizes its source and its culmination in the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is a sacramental sign of the Presence of the Lord, of His Sacrifice and of Communion in the mystical Banquet. All these dimensions are intimately linked. The presence alludes to the unique, real, tme, and substantial presence of the divine Person of Christ. The only sacrifice of Golgotha is made present again, that is, it becomes actual, at the moment of celebration when His body is delivered and His blood shed for us.

Through the Eucharist we unite intimately, in communion, with God and among us through Him. With beautiful words the then Cardinal Ratzinger illuminated the mystery saying: “What would become of us without the Eucharist? There would be no Church, there would be no sacrament, there would be no priesthood, there would be no presence, that unique presence of the Person of Christ, there would be no redemptive sacrifice.

“…The priest opens heaven so that Christ may come to earth. The priest does not art by himself, but has put on Christ and not only on the outside but also and above all on the inside. The Lord has taken possession of him and he does not belong, that is why the Lord acts and works through the priest. The Lord is present and pronounces by the mouth of the priest the holy words that transform earthly things into a divine mystery. … The Mass is not just a banquet. The sacrifice is present at Mass. He is present… . The sacrifice of the love of God that tore the veil of the temple, that split the wall that separated God and the world in two, that is the Mass. This is the event of the Eucharist. This is your greatness. Redemption is present because crucified love is present. The spear of the Roman soldier penetrated into the depths of the Heart of God. Christ has tom the sky at the hour of the cross and always tears it again in the hour of the Holy Eucharist.”

The Lord gave us the Eucharist at the Last Supper to be celebrated and contemplated. Well, what has been happening, especially since the Blessed Mother gave us this message? That the Eucharist was trivialized, it was degraded to a mere Protestantized banquet of a purely horizontal nature, where the presence, by the liturgical vanity, became (although I did not say it) symbolic. The stupor of the mystery was lost, the contemplative dimension was lost claiming that the Eucharist was given to be eaten and not worshiped, when the Holy Mass is in itself the most sublime act of adoration. The Holy Father more than once recalled the words of St. Augustine: “Let no one eat of that flesh (no one commune) without first worshiping It.. .because if we do not adore It, we would sin.”

The Eucharist and the priesthood, both a gift and mystery that the Lord left us before His Passion, claim each other. They were born together and go together: there is no priesthood without the Eucharistic sacrifice or Eucharist without ministerial priesthood. That is why, too, as the Eucharist is given less importance, the priesthood decays and becomes degraded. It is degraded by bad practice, a consequence of the aforementioned bad theology and by the liturgical contamination that horizontalized the celebration, displacing the center, which is and must always be God, towards the priest and the faithful. In this way, every dimension of transcendence, all reverence and stupor before the mystery, has been lost, and in many parts of the world, the anarchy of the cult has been lost. The priest became protagonist, the tabernacle was hidden, the altars of becoming the highest part were reduced. Some churches look more like an amphitheater than a church. In short, “The sacred things were given to the dogs and the jewels thrown to the pigs” (Mt 7:6).

Those who are in favor of these reforms are the same ones who mock those who hold, with all the weight of the Holy Scriptures and the Magisterium, that God is just and His justice fearsome. “The wrath of God,” they say, is a story to scare gullible and fearful souls. The diabolic of this plan is seen, which, on the one hand, makes the mystery vain, taking away from the Eucharist its sacrificial and therefore salvific dimension and ignoring the real presence of the Lord, at the same time that it degrades the priestly ministry, making Holy Mass a mere table of fraternal communion. In this way he offended God by not rendering him worship with due reverence and anointing and, at the same time, discredits the way of repentance because God, they say, cannot be offended because of his impassivity and because he is also merciful. Tragic fallacy that leads to eternal damnation.

The Mother of God urges us to initiate a true path of conversion by exhorting us to repent, to honor and adore the Holy Eucharist and to ask for God’s forgiveness knowing that it is just and that we can only offer as merit its infinite mercy.

I, your mother, through the intercession of Saint Michael the Archangel, ask you to amend your lives.

You are now receiving the last warnings. I love you very much and do not want your condemnation. The time left for major events to manifest is very short. Actually, these events have already begun. It is enough to only want to see the general apostasy, the rebellion of the nations against the Law of God, the persecution of Christians that is nothing other than the war against the Lamb, the great darkness that hangs over the world. But, the Lord does not leave us alone. He promised that he will be with us until the end of the world and that the gates of Hell will not prevail over His Church (cf. Mt 28:20 and Mt 16:18).

The true Church is persecuted and must be hidden, but even if at some point it seems to have disappeared it will not disappear. This is also the time that Heaven is present through these Marian apparitions to warn us and also to console us with the maternal presence and closeness of the Mother of God. This is the time that the Lord wants the ineffable and infinite gift of the Eucharist to be better known, loved, worshiped and in perpetual adoration. The adoration that does not end, the perpetual adoration, is the superabundant grace in moments when sin invades everything, perversion is imposed by laws and darkness envelops the earth.

The Blessed Virgin offers us her special protection. We remember that she came to Garabandal as Our Lady of Mount Carmel. Under the same invocation she had shown herself at Fatima on October 13,1917, when the series of apparitions to the three little shepherds ended. And previously, in Lourdes, the last appearance was on July 16, the feast day of the Virgin of Carmel. These are not mere coincidences but signs.

In this ancient dedication, that of Mount Carmel, the Blessed Virgin offers the scapular as a sign of her protection and pledge that assures us Paradise. The scapular is not a talisman but the seal of a covenant of love. She came and comes to protect us on the condition that we listen to her and do what she asks us to do. Therefore, the scapular is also a sign of our dedication, our consecration to the Mother of God and a sign that we are willing to amend and change our lives making a path of conversion whose goal is the encounter with God.

The scapular that she offers us is welcomed as her messages are. To cover ourselves with the protection and guidance of the Blessed Mother and to deserve her promise implies committing ourselves to live her messages of sacrifice, penance, sacramental fife.

Pray to Us with sincerity and We will grant your requests. You should make more sacrifices. Think about the passion of Jesus. Words of great consolation. The Lord does not reject a sincere and humiliated heart, a broken spirit does not despise him (cf. Ps 51). The Blessed Virgin speaks in plural because She is our Lawyer and Mediator of all graces.

The deep contemplation of the Passion of the Lord should lead us to sacrifice ourselves more, to imitate His love.

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Reprinted with kind permission of Garabandal Journal /May-June 2019
This article written by Fr. Justo Lofeudo is dated circa 2012.